Chapter 4
HAILEY
I was scanning the horizon for signs of threats when I saw them. Dragons. They flew with purpose. Two in the lead, a dozen more at a distance, their shadows slicing through the cloud cover and stretching monstrous against the teal valley floor.
Jax tensed beside me.
Adalinda let out a high, piercing call, nothing like human speech, everything like a siren.
The two lead dragons altered course and began to descend, spiraling down with grace.
They landed a stone’s throw away, then approached, tails held still, wings partially furled.
It was a posture I recognized from childhood animal documentaries.
The way wolves approach their alpha, acknowledging dominance without showing weakness.
The first dragon was like a living wedge of obsidian whose scales drank every drop of light.
He moved with a precision that would have embarrassed the best Marine.
Every step looked measured to the millimeter, head level, eyes unblinking.
When he drew near, he bowed, a real, honest-to-God bow, lowering his massive head and neck until his jaw brushed the mossy rock.
The second dragon was the opposite in every visible way.
Where the first was shadow, she was fire.
Her scales flickered with orange and sunburst yellow, the colors shifting in slow motion like the surface of a living flame.
She didn’t bow. She watched, but she did incline her head, a gesture that somehow managed to communicate both deference and judgment.
Flint vibrated with excitement. He’d crept down from my back to stand behind my foreleg, poking his head out for a better look.
“Do you see them? They’re so big. Are we supposed to bow too?
” His thoughts were sharp now, quick and layered, less like a child and more like someone who’d just learned a second language and wanted to test all the words at once.
“Wait and see,” I murmured.
The black dragon raised his head and addressed us directly, not aloud, but as a thundercrack in my mind, a masculine voice with the weight of an ancient cathedral bell.
“Queen Adalinda. We wondered if you would ever come. One of our seers had a vision that said you would. I did not believe her. That is my shame.”
Adalinda’s eyes gleamed, caught between mirth and something sharper. “Corvus. You always preferred your own counsel over the wisdom of the court.”
Beside me, Jax was utterly still, watching the encounter or an assassin marking his prey. It was hard to tell with my mate. He let nothing show, but I could feel the calculations running behind his eyes.
Corvus’s bow deepened, almost an apology. “It is good to see you as yourself, my Queen. Will you introduce the others?”
I braced myself, ready to be called out as the impostor in the room, but Adalinda was already answering. “This is Hailey and her mate, Jax. The hatchling is Flint.”
The orange-scaled dragon advanced, her steps lighter, almost musical. “And I am Solenne, once your Voice, now regent in your absence. Forgive my manners; it has been centuries since I greeted a queen.”
She looked at Adalinda, but her gaze flicked briefly over me, then Jax, then Flint. Her eyes lingered on Flint, then she blinked, a slow and deliberate gesture. “You brought a child with you?”
Flint puffed up, every scale standing at attention. “I am not a child. I can fly and hunt and remember every dream I have ever had.”
The telepathic chorus from the surrounding dragons was amused surprise but died quickly.
Solenne smiled, a ripple of warm orange. “You are a treasure. Welcome.”
Corvus straightened and spoke to Adalinda again. “Forgive our caution. This is a dangerous time in Ayrathys. The wild one, Vaelog, remains at large. We have done what we can, but the threat grows.”
Adalinda’s tail twitched, a sign of her irritation. “He is here? Has he built a following?”
I looked at Jax in surprise. How was he here? He was supposed to be trapped
“No. He is alone. But he is not himself. He is mad. I have never seen such hunger.”
At the mention of Vaelog, every dragon in the field fell silent, even the ones circling far above. Their collective memory rolled over me. Fear, hatred, awe.
“Wait,” Flint projected. “Why is he here? I thought he was in prison. Mama said so.”
Solenne’s gaze found me, then Adalinda, then Flint. “When a dragon dies by the dagger, it is not an ending. The human body is lost, but the dragon soul is delivered here, intact and unspoiled. Every dragon that Vaelog killed with the blade is in this world. As are the ones you lost, Adalinda.”
I watched Adalinda carefully. She didn't flinch, but her scales pulsed with a subtle iridescence, the color of regret. “When we separated him from his dragon permanently, we must’ve sent his dragon here. I had no idea.”
Jax took a step forward, breaking the tableau. “You called this place Ayrathys. What is it, really?”
Corvus fixed him with those obsidian eyes. “It is a vault, a refuge. Some say it is heaven. I say it is a grave. We live, we fly, but if we die here, there is nowhere left for us to go. There is no world after this.”
The words hung in the air, cold as interstellar ice.
Flint pressed himself against my side, no longer vibrating. “Do the dead remember everything? Do they remember who they were?”
Solenne answered. “We remember everything. And so do the monsters. That is why Vaelog is so dangerous here. He brings all his knowledge, all his rage, and none of the limitations. He has made himself into something new, something we do not understand.”
“There is more,” Solenne went on gravely.
“It is our theory, untested, but every fight bears it out, that with each dragon Vaelog killed with the blade, he took something. A measure of strength. A piece of power. He has the weight of every life he ended pressed into him, and he has grown more formidable with each. That is why nothing we’ve tried has worked, and he lives. ”
I looked at the sky, at the formations of dragons slicing between the clouds. “How many are there?”
Corvus considered. “More than there have been in centuries. Most lie dormant, but some have formed courts, armies, nests. Others wander. But all remember the old wars.”
The gravity of it settled on me, heavier than the change in my own body. Every dragon killed by Vaelog was here, alive and plotting. And so was Vaelog himself, freed from whatever shackles had once held him in check.
Corvus twisted his mouth, a gesture halfway between a sneer and a grimace. “He is clever. He is cruel. Every time we corner him, he slithers away. Every trap, every strategy, he finds the gap. We have wounded him, but he returns, always more violent.”
Solenne’s telepathic voice was softer, almost maternal. “We had hoped you would return, Queen. It was a myth, a comfort for the dying, but it is true. You are here. You can unite us.”
There it was. The real reason for the parade-ground courtesy.
They needed Adalinda to lead them, to finish what had started centuries ago.
I glanced at Jax, who was now processing the request with the same ruthless logic I’d always admired.
His mind was a fortress, and if he had thoughts about Adalinda’s prospects as Queen, he kept them to himself.
Flint whispered, barely a thought at all, “Does this mean we have to fight him?”
“Maybe,” I said. “But we don’t have to do it alone.”
The dragons behind Corvus and Solenne crept closer, still at a respectful distance.
Some had scales like old coins, dull and pitted.
Others gleamed, unmarred by time or battle.
A few bore wounds that never fully healed, great rips in their wings or scars along their flanks.
Their faces were cautious, expectant. I wondered what they saw when they looked at us, at me, especially.
Did I look like a Queen’s champion? Would they know that Jax and I were not born dragons?
That Adalinda had gifted us our dragon forms?
Corvus bowed again, lower this time, and Solenne followed suit. “We ask you to be our Queen, Adalinda. Not for old times’ sake, but for this world. Ayrathys has never needed you more.”
Adalinda’s wings unfurled, and for a moment she looked both impossibly ancient and heartbreakingly young.
She took a step forward, then hesitated.
Her scales shifted, colors warring beneath the surface.
“I accept the call,” she said, her voice ringing out like a bell over the valley.
“But I will not rule by war alone. If I am to be Queen, it will be to bring peace.”
The telepathic tide surged through the assembled dragons, shock, hope, skepticism, all at once. Some bowed in response, others exchanged sidelong glances, their faces unreadable.
Jax moved closer to me, our scales brushing. Flint was quiet, pressed flat against my side, his thoughts a tangled skein of fear and longing and new understanding.
Solenne’s eyes were bright, reflecting both suns. “Then let us begin. There is much to do, and little time. Vaelog will not wait for us to organize.”
Adalinda nodded, then turned to Jax and me. “Are you with me?”
I looked at Flint, at Jax, at the ranks of dragons gathering on the slopes above. I thought of home, of the family we’d left behind, of the war waiting for us on the other side of the horizon. “Always,” I said. “Let’s show them how it’s done.”
And so, we stepped forward, into the center of a storm that had been centuries in the making, ready to make the new rules as we went.